In a bid to negate Subramanian Swamy on economic downturn, Piyush Goyal says Einstein discovered gravity, faces social media roasting

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JKR Staff
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Union Minister Piyush Goyal on Thursday became a subject of social media ridicule after a viral video showed him say that Einstein and not Newton had invented the phenomenon of gravity. Goyal, who holds the commerce ministry in the Centre’s Narendra Modi government, was attending a Board of Trade meeting when he desperately sought to defend his government on the slump in the economy. In a bid to seemingly negate his own party colleague Subramanian Swamy, Goyal ended up making an embarrassing gaffe.

Piyush Goyal

Goyal said, “Don’t go into the calculations that you see on television ‘Oh if you are looking at a $ 5 trillion economy, the country will have to grow at 12%. Today it’s growing at 6-7 %.’ Don’t go into those maths. Maths have never helped Einstein discover gravity. If he had only gone by structured formulae, I don’t think there would have been any innovations in this world.”

BJP’s Rajya Sabha MP Subramanian Swamy had recently told a TV channel that India will have to grow by 14.5% every year until 2024 to achieve the Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s target of a $ 5 trillion economy. He had said, “What’s happened is since 2015 we are sliding down. And now the quarter is down to 5%. The 5% is on current prices. I don’t think in constant prices, this will be more than 3.5%. That’s a real real collapse we’re heading to….So essentially we are facing not a recession but a depression. Now in this context, you had the target of $ 5 trillion. That would mean doubling of the GDP of five years…That means a growth rate of 14.5% per year.”

No sooner did his video emerge on social media, Twitterati began to poke fun at the union minister.

Earlier, Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman had faced social media ridicule for blaming Ola and Uber cab services for the slump in the sales of automobiles in India. She had said, “Automobile sector, in particular, has been affected by several things. These include BS6 (Bharat Stage 6) movement, the registration fee issue that has been deferred till June and the mindset of millennials, who are now preferring not to commit EMIs to buying automobiles but prefer to use Ola or Uber or take the metro.”

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